Some commentators originally suggested that affiliate links work best in the context of the information contained within the website itself. For instance, if a website contains information pertaining to publishing a website, an affiliate link leading to a merchant's internet service provider (ISP) within that website's content would be appropriate. If a website contains information pertaining to sports, an affiliate link leading to a sporting goods website may work well within the context of the articles and information about sports. The goal, in this case, is to publish quality information on the website and provide context-oriented links to related merchant's websites.

A content marketer, for example, can create a series of blog posts that serve to generate leads from a new ebook the business recently created. The company's social media marketer might then help promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business's social media accounts. Perhaps the email marketer creates an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more information on the company. We'll talk more about these specific digital marketers in a minute.

It’s important to know where your traffic is coming from and the demographics of your audience. This will allow you to customize your messaging so that you can provide the best affiliate product recommendations. You shouldn’t just focus on the vertical you’re in, but on the traffic sources and audience that’s visiting your site. Traffic sources may include organic, paid, social media, referral, display, email, or direct traffic. You can view traffic source data in Google Analytics to view things such as time on page, bounce rate, geo location, age, gender, time of day, devices (mobile vs. desktop), and more so that you can focus your effort on the highest converting traffic. This analytics data is crucial to making informed decisions, increasing your conversion rates, and making more affiliate sales.
Think about this. If you are the person that processes that order, again you are making more money the first time you process it. Yes, there is a little bit more work, but you also own that customer data. So if you want to sell a box of 10 pens as an upsell or if you want to sell them new notebooks or if you want to have a huge Black Friday sale, you are the one that’s marketing to that same person.
Not necessarily, but a blog is really the best promotional tool. With that said, you can always use methods such as PPC or advertising to promote a product. This is more like hit-and-run affiliate marketing, however. The best way to make the most out of your affiliate marketing opportunities is to have a blog and use it for hard and soft promotion. Learn how to start a blog here.
I really feel like I have imparted (as best I could) a lot of secrets of my marketing success in this email and the ones on my “info product” series (which I am now turning into a full blown eBook) I hope that people do use some of these methods and succeed and I am trying to give away more than enough for people to do so. SO I really enjoy positive comments where people are actually utilizing and taking some of the information onbaord.
AWIN is probably best for experienced affiliates who can hit the ground running without a lot of guidance or feedback from the network. There is a $5 fee charged to apply to become an affiliate, but if you’re approved, the $5 will be added to your account. If your application is denied, however, you will lose the $5 fee. AWIN operates globally, but it is most heavily concentrated on British and EU merchants.

888.com is a premium gaming destination and a well established name in the casino and poker circuit. Its site offers numerous sub-brands including 888sport, 888ladies, 888bingo, 888casino and 888poker, as well as ReefClub Casino. The 888 family of companies attract millions of players, and the company provides affiliates with frequent promotions to keep players interested.

Hi, I would recommend you to do Affiliate Marketing. I have tried Aliexpress as well but the big disadvantage with that program are the long shipping times, in general 20-40 days and customers want the product now. You will have lot of complaints about the delivery. Some people look down on Affiliate Marketing because they think you make only a few bucks per product. But if you are smart you only promote affiliate stuff with high payouts. I am involved in a program that pays up to $5000 per single sale. PM me if interested. Because you have to promote your products anyway, whether you advertise for a product where you make $1 from or a product you make $5000 from.
Affiliate marketing gives you access to regular new offers, and you tend to spend more time promoting specific products. This enables you to focus more on a particular item and see your progress much more easily via tracking tools. You can also join an affiliate network and get help, advice and management for your campaigns, and it’s completely free.
“I emailed each partner via a mass broadcast email to let them know to stop sending traffic. I chose that route immediately because it informed everyone quickly, and allowed them time to stop sending their highly-targeted traffic to an offer not making them any money. After the broadcast, I began to personally call, Skype, Facebook, and text all the contacts one at a time. I wanted to ensure them we were doing everything possible to make things right, and thank them for their support,” he said.
Really helpful content jeff. I love your blog. I was actually thinking of doing a weightloss blog as I have struggled with losing for a long time, and now eventually have diabetics. So I will add things. I might let you look at it and perhaps you would give me your opinion. Another thing, I was promoting an offer over facebook, unfortunatly I never got sales. but this has fired me up. I must use an opt page next time. Then at least I will collect emails.
For example, say you want to sell tablet cases for the new iPad. You find a distributor willing to sell them to you for $10 each. You take them to your storefront and make a product listing for that product at $20. You go about doing the marketing, the outreach, and the customer engagement necessary to make people aware of your site and your storefront.

Brands are using both types of marketing effectively. Both channels are useful for boosting a brand’s business and market share, so don’t feel as if you have to limit yourself to one or the other. If you aren’t already incorporating both influencers and affiliates into your marketing strategy, you’re missing out on some of the best possible opportunities to grow sales and brand awareness.

Marketing automation is an integral platform that ties all of your digital marketing together. Without it, your campaigns will look like an unfinished puzzle with a crucial missing piece. Marketing automation software streamlines and automates marketing tasks and workflows. Most importantly, it measures the results and ROI of your digital campaigns, helping you to grow revenue faster.

Sometimes merchants are in the process of closing down or declaring bankruptcy. Merchants don’t need to specify this while an affiliate is hard at work trying to make their commissions. In the event that a merchant declares bankruptcy, the affiliate marketing business loses any money owed to them. This includes the money spent on ads and also their affiliate commission on sales made.

Many affiliate programs run with last-click attribution, where the affiliate receiving the last click before the sale gets 100% credit for the conversion. This is changing. With affiliate platforms providing new attribution models and reporting features, you are able to see a full-funnel, cross-channel view of how individual marketing tactics are working together. For example, you might see that a paid social campaign generated the first click, Affiliate X got click 2, and Affiliate Y got the last click. With this full picture, you can structure your affiliate commissions so that Affiliate X gets a percentage of the credit for the sale, even though they didn’t get the last click.

Just as a chain of sales persons market and sell your product for commission, using affiliate marketing services you can get many websites to sell your product in exchange for commission, which ultimately makes it a cost effective yet profitable practice, which any business must make use of. Affiliates provide links to your products on their websites or through email marketing for commission based on cost-per-sale, cost-per-click or cost-per-lead.
3: How greedy are you? Affiliates depend on the sale price of the item and your percentage cut. On Amazon it starts out at 4%. If you’re selling a $10 item, 4% is not a lot; only 40 cents. Meanwhile, selling a $5 item for $10 on your dropship storefront will make you $5 profit on every item sold. You have more work and more infrastructure to build, but you end up with significantly higher profits for similar amounts of sales.

Google, if you a relying on search traffic, can change how they send traffic, rank your page, and how you show up on the SERPS at the drop of a hat. Really, you don’t have control on boosting your traffic when relying on organic search results because it’s not paid. If you are relying on other people’s traffic or other people’s affiliate offers, it can run dry very quickly. It’s not up to you with affiliate marketing. With drop shipping (or selling your own products or private labeling), you have that control over traffic sources.

As a marketer, you have to always engage and interact with your audience. Relationships are important in affiliate marketing, especially if you work as an individual. People trust those they like, and if you faithfully answer questions about the merchant or product, they will most likely move further into the sales funnel, increasing your conversions.
Your display ads should be visually stimulating to viewers and aim to hold their attention long enough to entice them to click to your website. Though it's natural to want to share all the details about your product, you should be as simple as possible with your display ads so that viewers aren't overwhelmed. If you include too much information right off the bat, viewers could stop reading or lose interest - simply because there's too much to read. The ad should be simple and direct.
Since you’re essentially a freelancer, you get ultimate independence in setting your own goals, redirecting your path when you feel so inclined, choosing the products that interest you, and even determining your own hours. This convenience means you can diversify your portfolio if you like or focus solely on simple and straightforward campaigns. You’ll also be free from company restrictions and regulations as well as ill-performing teams.

Don’t sell sand in the desert. Even if you use an award-winning design and have the best deals on the market, you won’t be successful if you don’t get the right offers to the right people. One-size-fits-all messages are not effective or profitable. Imagine that you provide a free trial of your software although your subscribers are already your clients. Or, that you want to sell sausages to vegans.

The best way to think about affiliate marketing is quality over quantity. There are a lot of small websites that will promote your product, but the key is finding a small number of partners that will deliver conversions. For example, an equity management services firm has over 20,000 affiliates in its system, but only about 25 affiliates generate 85 percent of revenue.
Hi, Jamie! Very good list. I needed something like this for 2018 so that I know what to target in the future blogs I create. As for now, I’m comfortable using SiteGround affiliate network and it’s pretty good actually. Their hosting service is pretty much the best considered its price. I’ve tried others but SiteGround stands out. I’ll also try new affiliate networks, something from the list you have just provided. I think Amazon is too saturated at the moment, and I need a better network. 2018 will be interesting indeed.
Do you have zero interest in an expensive mountain bike the company you are an affiliate of sells? Well, you probably don’t want to feature it on your blog, as it is extremely difficult to persuade readers (or anyone for that matter) that they should buy something you wouldn’t be caught spending a single penny on. When you are passionate about a product or–at the very least–interested in learning more about it, this will come through to your readers, engage them and better coax them to buy

Affiliate marketing is one way to make money online for those who want to derive an income from their web use. An affiliate marketer promotes specific products or websites in exchange for a cut of the profits or commissions from the web traffic she generates. Any time the recommendation/web traffic from an internet affiliate leads to a sale, the affiliate earns money. In other words, the products or services are provided by others, while you provide a sales or marketing outlet. While there are no successful get-rich-quick schemes, many people have found success doing internet marketing as an affiliate. Learning how to work as a successful affiliate marketer can help you determine whether a career in this potentially lucrative field might be right for you.

Honestly speaking, both dropshipping and affiliate marketing requires hard work to start. Most people enter online marketing thinking that they can easily get rich by making the website and streams of income will start popping out in no time. That is a grave mistake. Whether it is dropshipping business, affiliate marketing, or any other online business, it requires consistent effort to grow the business.

In the example above I answer three questions from a reader. This is a great email because it covers a few techniques I’ve learned as a blogger. So the subscriber receives genuine value. In addition, I’ve carefully woven in three recommendations for the Blog Success program. The message is content-filled, but it also gives a subtle push to learn more about blogging through my affiliate link.

After joining an affiliate platform, browse the products and services that you could promote. Each of them will have specific conditions, and you’ll get a link that you need to promote in order to make sales. Affiliate marketing is one of the quickest ways to make money online without investing anything because you won’t be selling your own products.

Again, our potential is limitless because we have ZERO customer contact. Everything is automated. We literally make money when we sleep. I don’t care if you only dropship, you still get to deal with customers. Yes, our customers are one-and-done (you can have an affiliate business model where you do get repeats, it just is not the way we are set up). However, there are millions of potential customers, with new ones coming each day, so as long as we maintain good search engine position (again, easier said than done), we are golden.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important -- according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's' journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it's likely to reflect positively on your business's bottom line.
PeerFly only has a limited number of products at the moment, but they have tremendous momentum and are growing by leaps and bounds. Their payout rates aren’t spectacular, but everything is upfront and transparent, and affiliate satisfaction is very high. PeerFly is perfect for authentic marketers who want to offer high-quality products to their visitors as opposed to “get rich quick” schemes and opaque offers.
Affiliate marketers are only paid when someone in their audience takes an action that you’ve committed to pay for. If you’ve committed to pay a commission for sales, they’ll only get paid after they actually drive sales. 5 percent to 10 percent commission rates are common, although commissions on products like electronics tend to be lower. If you’ve committed to pay for qualified leads, you only have to pay when they refer a lead that meets the qualifications you’ve specified.
On the other hand, if your goal is to get people to promote your product or service, special offers, discounts and more through channels other than social media, then use affiliate marketing. Target bloggers, companies and publishers with content that complements or relates to your brand base. Understand your customers’ needs and their interests so that you speak to your target audience about what matters most to them. If you sell workout gear, then partner with health and fitness publishers that focus on weight loss, healthy eating and more. This approach of speaking to specific customers with specific needs works because affiliate marketing is designed to generate leads and help you grow your revenue.
“At times, affiliates may not be driving traffic or converting as much as they used to, or as much as you know they’re capable. This can be a lack of new offers or promotions, or they may have promoted a certain product too many times, and their list is burnt out on it. This is more common than you may think,” he said, but added that “several things can be done to alleviate this.”
“It is absolutely vital to provide them with real-time reporting. Obviously, this reporting needs to be 100% accurate with integrity. Some affiliates will be running 100+ different sources to your offer, and by offering them real-time reporting, they can quickly determine which sources are working and which are not. You save yourself money as well as your affiliates. This also helps scale quickly if you have a good performing offer,” he said.
AliExpress has improved shipping greatly for the last year, not it takes less time to deliver to many countries, even with standard China post. Besides, when you offer free shipping on all products, your clients are ready to wait. Furthermore, we strongly recommend using ePacket shipping option that takes only 5-14 days to deliver and is free or costs $2-5.
One major disadvantage of affiliate marketing is that there’s virtually no customer loyalty on its own. You can build loyalty to your blog, but most affiliate sites are narrow niches and are not designed for long-term readers. I might look up faucet reviews and read a blog about them, then click their link to Amazon to buy a faucet, but you can bet I’m not going to bookmark and keep coming back to that faucet blog. If I want to buy another one of those faucets, I’m going straight to Amazon, and you’re not getting the referral for that second sale.
Awesome article! This is jam packed with great info. I am just starting a personal finance blog with my fiance and we were a little confused about how to start monetizing. We were initially thinking about using Google AdSense but between this post and another blog I read I am surely convinced that’s not the correct route. I’m really happy you have shared this information because it’s provided an excellent starting point for creating income.
Dropshipping or affiliate marketing, which one should you go for? Online businesses are a very promising way of making money quickly if you know the basics and you work hard at it. Consequently, many people have started selling their own products or getting them wholesale from Asian suppliers. These types of e-commerce are mostly a secondary form of income and don’t require too much work to maintain.
While affiliate marketing is great for starters who don’t want to mingle with customer support, I believe dropshipping is a much more lucrative option. Running an online dropshipping store can make you more money than an affiliate marketing website. You can easily market your products through Facebook Ads and Google Ads. Further, if your store is providing great quality of products, you will soon start to get a consistent stream of orders.

What many affiliate marketers do is find their niche in the market. This allows them to be focused on specific products or merchants, which lets them gain loyal followers and build a reputation that reflects expertise on a particular subject. After all, you as a consumer will most likely take the word of a person who has reviewed all kinds of vehicles as opposed to someone who reviews everything from sports cars to lemonade to fertilizer.

The reason this could be beneficial for those interested in affiliate marketing, is let’s say you are promoting something super technical that maybe you don’t have all the answers for, something very specialized. Could be a new type of electronic, something like that. If you promote it as an affiliate. You don’t have to worry about answering these questions or dealing with complicated customer service issues. So not dealing with customer service could be a huge benefit if you promote or produce content in a niche like that.

When you create sign-up or subscription forms, include options for subscribers to self-select preferences. Even free platforms like MailChimp allow you to provide segmenting options. For instance, you can ask subscribers about particular interests, product preferences, or content interests. Options for affiliate marketers may include: 1) Newsletters, 2) Deals and Discounts, 3) Announcements and 4) New Product Updates. Some subscribers may select to receive content on all of these, whereas others might only have interest in one or two.

I would like to add that for information products, a lot of the time it’s pretty easy to rank for “information product review”. I recently did a review of a popular ebook that is a month long discipline program. I went about it by doing the actual program and documenting everything. At the end of the month I wrote up a 2700 word article summing up the whole experience.
As with many things in life, affiliate marketing benefits from quality over quantity. Having many affiliates that drive traffic can be seen as a good thing, but this may spread your team too thin preventing them from focusing on the quality affiliates that are generating the most conversions, especially since the strategy and marketing collateral most likely won’t be the same for each affiliate.
In the world of internet marketing, the closest thing you'll ever find to a push button ATM is to build your own email list. But because the tools and resources and marketing platforms are constantly changing, many marketers will wait forever before actually starting an email list in the first place. So in this course, you'll parse down the information overload and focus only on the essential lean startup tools you need to build a simple, scalable, and sustainable push button online empire.
Affiliate networks also make it very easy to find products and services to promote. They will list advertisers by category and show which advertisers other publishers are currently having the most success with. Commission Junction, a large affiliate advertising network, currently has nearly 3,000 different advertisers listed. You will have the most success by promoting products that are closely related to the content that you write about. If you had a website about investing, you would primarily want to promote investing related services like stock brokerages and stock research tools. You wouldn’t get good results by promoting unrelated services like web hosting and domain name registration services.
Look to see what others say about them. I was looking at one dropshipper which had what I thought was some good products. But checking them out it turned out the products were crap and their customer service was appalling. Once they got the customers money they did not give a damn. And if you're dropshipping their product it is you who has to deal with them and will get it in the neck from your customers. And did I mention they were charging £125 per year for you to dropship their goods.
Wow! You wouldn’t believe how long it took to write this post. (Almost 10 hours – Including the sample emails.) Hopefully I did a good job of explaining what it takes to create a great series of email messages. Like I said in the introduction, this is the exact mechanisms I use to make money. So I’d definitely recommend learning all you can about email marketing.
Unlike with advertising networks, you’ll rarely be rejected when applying to an affiliate network or program based solely on your audience size. I’ve processed thousands of applications and have never rejected someone for that ridiculous reason. Most program managers happily accept bloggers of any size because they know the blogger’s reach will grow in time and if they’ve nurtured the relationship early on, it will benefit the company when they break out.

You can iron out the details of how you will go about your PPC ads for the merchant once you’re granted permission to run paid ads on their behalf. Ask about advertising guidelines (some companies are strict when it comes to advertising and their brand), prohibited keywords, and expectations from each other. Talk to the merchant’s marketing team so you can maximize resources instead of replicating each other’s efforts.

I’d stick with Amazon if I were you. All of my Amazon sites only have Amazon affiliate links. If you use Google Adsense display ads on your site, you’re literally taking people away from your site for the sake of just a few cents with these type of ads. If you direct them just to Amazon, then you have a greater chance of earning more money from that click.
In November 1994, CDNow launched its BuyWeb program. CDNow had the idea that music-oriented websites could review or list albums on their pages that their visitors might be interested in purchasing. These websites could also offer a link that would take visitors directly to CDNow to purchase the albums. The idea for remote purchasing originally arose from conversations with music label Geffen Records in the fall of 1994. The management at Geffen wanted to sell its artists' CD's directly from its website but did not want to implement this capability itself. Geffen asked CDNow if it could design a program where CDNow would handle the order fulfillment. Geffen realized that CDNow could link directly from the artist on its website to Geffen's website, bypassing the CDNow home page and going directly to an artist's music page.[14]
Now there is a big difference in those two different business models, not just in terms of how you make money but in terms of where you can advertise. With Google, especially Google Adwords and Google Product Listing Ads, they do not allow affiliate sites. You can’t upload your CSV of products and get traffic from Google if you have an affiliate site. And that is massive!
Aim for quality over quantity. Having a vast network of affiliates will not necessarily help you earn more money. According to some experts, the key to successful affiliate marketing is to find the right affiliates that will drive the most results for your platform. Those affiliates may be big sites, small sites, or a combination of the two, but the most important thing is to build and maintain strong relationships with your chosen affiliates.[40]
As with many things in life, affiliate marketing benefits from quality over quantity. Having many affiliates that drive traffic can be seen as a good thing, but this may spread your team too thin preventing them from focusing on the quality affiliates that are generating the most conversions, especially since the strategy and marketing collateral most likely won’t be the same for each affiliate.

Sorry I was not more clear in my questions, we want to market products and re-direct traffic from our website to the seller websites. With that said, we need to know how to get started in forming relationships with sellers whereby they allow us to market their products and whereby they will pay us commissions if their items are purchased as result of our website being visited by their eventual customers. What is the contractual arrangement? What is the typical commission that we would be paid? How do we formalize and structure the contractual arrangement between us and the sellers, etc? We need the specifics on this process.

Look to see what others say about them. I was looking at one dropshipper which had what I thought was some good products. But checking them out it turned out the products were crap and their customer service was appalling. Once they got the customers money they did not give a damn. And if you're dropshipping their product it is you who has to deal with them and will get it in the neck from your customers. And did I mention they were charging £125 per year for you to dropship their goods.

Unfortunately, the 2Checkout dashboard is a bit limited in scope, making it difficult to get any metrics on conversion rates or even sorting by commission payouts. The workaround is to go to the Avangate store, which does list their best-selling products, and then search for these on the affiliate dashboard. That being said, 2Checkout does offer products from more than 4,000 different vendors, making it the leading affiliate network for software and digital products.
People aren’t just watching cat videos and posting selfies on social media these days. Many rely on social networks to discover, research, and educate themselves about a brand before engaging with that organization. For marketers, it’s not enough to just post on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. You must also weave social elements into every aspect of your marketing and create more peer-to-peer sharing opportunities. The more your audience wants to engage with your content, the more likely it is that they will want to share it. This ultimately leads to them becoming a customer. And as an added bonus, they will hopefully influence their friends to become customers, too.
One big difference between SkimLinks and VigLinks, however, is that once you’re approved by the company, you can choose to work with any merchant or program on its platform. SkimLinks has also published a white paper discussing its partnership with Buzzfeed, giving SkimLinks a lot of credibility. SkimLinks also has a higher tier of vetted merchants called “Preferred Partner” and “VIP” that both pay higher commissions than standard merchants.
As a marketer, you have to always engage and interact with your audience. Relationships are important in affiliate marketing, especially if you work as an individual. People trust those they like, and if you faithfully answer questions about the merchant or product, they will most likely move further into the sales funnel, increasing your conversions.
Now this one is the biggest for me, but drop shipping will open up new traffic sources and ways to find customers. I have ran plenty of affiliate sites in the past ten years, and I still have some affiliate sites which have generated close to seven figures in commissions alone. Affiliate marketing works, but it’s totally different from drop shipping for how you get people to your site.
When you create sign-up or subscription forms, include options for subscribers to self-select preferences. Even free platforms like MailChimp allow you to provide segmenting options. For instance, you can ask subscribers about particular interests, product preferences, or content interests. Options for affiliate marketers may include: 1) Newsletters, 2) Deals and Discounts, 3) Announcements and 4) New Product Updates. Some subscribers may select to receive content on all of these, whereas others might only have interest in one or two.
It may seem like the same amount of work but it really isn't. You are not going to be able to advertise the same way as an affiliate. In fact, many platforms will not let you advertise affiliate products. That means you will have to put in much more work getting your pages to rank organically and doing social marketing, although there is less work dealing with customers. Also, the payoff will always be higher for dropshipping versus affiliate.

Dropshipping is no doubt better for entrepreneurs, because they can set up their own margins and price uplift. Nobody thinks for the customers in this situation, because they are paying more for something, which costs less. This get me motivated to create a small affiliate eCommerce aggregator with the best tech deals from one of the biggest China online wholesalers. Because I truly believe that the customer needs to pay the true price of the product I also implemented a Crypto Cash Back reward program where he can withdraw up to the full amount of the affiliate commission in cryptocurrency. Soon I will also add paypal.

I’m not sure of the exact reasons why I started to rank, but I have a few theories. It was a very long, honest, and informative post on the subject. I believe this made it stand out from all the other reviews in which the author just wrote up a basic summary of what it’s about. It also is one of the latest reviews on the book, so perhaps google freshness has something to do with it. I haven’t done any linkbuilding on this page and it currently sits at #2.

Branding, it's the most important thing. How you're going to market, advertise & promote your products. Be it able to get customer or affliate, but branding your products for conversions is one of the most important factor when doing drop shipping. Because the products are not yours so you've to make it seems much better than any other person who is providing it.

Cost per mille requires only that the publisher make the advertising available on his or her website and display it to the page visitors in order to receive a commission. Pay per click requires one additional step in the conversion process to generate revenue for the publisher: A visitor must not only be made aware of the advertisement but must also click on the advertisement to visit the advertiser's website.
I quite agree with your your write up. I run not affiliate marketing and drop shipping business, the most important factor is your control over how much you make. In drop shipping, you can make more money than affiliate marketing because list building may not work all d time besides if you have a well optimized store or website, its far better than list as your are sure of meeting new desperate buyers everyday, both business are great but its how you run it that matters.

If you don’t already know what drop shipping is, it’s the retail method in which you don’t keep products in stock. Instead of warehousing, you partner with a drop shipping supplier that stocks its own inventory. You transfer customer orders and shipment details to them, and the suppliers ship the order directly to the customer. Here’s a graph to help you understand the drop shipping business model:

Affiliate marketing is commonly confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. However, both are distinct forms of marketing and the main difference between them is that affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations to drive sales while referral marketing relies on trust and personal relationships to drive sales